President Obama’s Race to the Top program was intended to award states that implement “coherent, compelling, and comprehensive education reform.” Governors from a variety of states were excited at the prospect of competing for a share of the $4 billion set aside for the program, but the excitement very quickly transformed into disappointment when Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced that only two states would be receiving a share of the money: Delaware and Tennessee.

What exactly is the status of the U.S. military’s official policy on the 17-year-old “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, which allows homosexuals to serve in the armed forces — as long as they don’t tell anybody they’re “gay”? Not even Army Secretary John McHugh seems clear, as demonstrated by a comment he made to reporters in late March. When pressed on the status of the policy, which President Obama is pressuring Congress to overturn, McHugh said he believed Defense Secretary Robert Gates had placed a moratorium on dismissals of homosexuals from the military pending a Pentagon survey of troops on their views of the issue.

A bipartisan group of U.S. Senators is teaming up with the Obama administration to legalize illegal immigrants and require biometric national ID cards for every American worker, prompting a swift and bipartisan backlash across the nation.

The arrests on March 28 and 29 of nine people associated with the so-called Hutaree Militia in Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio have provided media commentators and reporters with an opportunity to broadly smear all political conservatives, constitutionalists, Tea Party activists, and opponents of President Obama's health care as "extremist" and "anti-government."

State governments across the nation are facing debt problems that seem overwhelming. California, when all the state obligations are counted, has a debt equal to 37 percent of its annual income, at least according to one estimate. Pensions account for much of this problem. Andrew Biggs at the American Enterprise Institute observes that if those pension debts are included, the Rhode Island would be so deeply in debt that it would fall outside the 60 percent governmental debt limit set by the European Union, as would even oil-rich Alaska.